14
It's a complete irrelevancy. It is still early, and Bitcoins are worth on the order of $3 each. If you want to be an early adopter, buy Bitcoins now.
If Bitcoins never become really valuable, what difference does it make whether it's fair or not? The sums involved will be modest.
If Bitcoins ever do become really valuable, what difference does it make ...
14
I can’t really offer much insight into the reliability of the website you’ve linked, but if you’re really keen to verify what is posted there, you could run your own node, and then find/write some code to index and organize all addresses by their balance. More generally, questions asking about the reliability of a certain website or service are off-topic ...
8
Bitcoin was publicly announced before mining began. Those who were interested in cryptography and new digital technology were more likely than others to learn about it sooner, and it's perfectly fair that they were in a position to profit more from any rise in its value since its success would mean the information they were browsing had more value than the ...
8
It is not that someone gets money for hearing about Bitcoin before you. They get money for TAKING ACTION before you did. What gives Bitcoin value is all the people working on the software and services to make it better. What gives Bitcoin value is people educating others about it, and getting merchants to use it. What gives Bitcoin value is people acquiring ...
7
A lot of people who accumulated thousands of coins in the early days spent them on silly things or cashed out during the 2012 bubble. Lazlo for example, spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizzas. Nobody knew that bitcoin would rise to the prices we briefly saw in 2013 or that we have today. The same thing will happen again, people have a price and will very ...
6
Hearing about Bitcoin is the easy part. The hard part is having the vision to understand how it's revolutionary, spending the resources to acquire it (whether other currency or electricity/compute power), taking the risk that it might not eventually succeed - and in so doing, taking a part in helping Bitcoin succeed thus making the world a better place. This ...
5
The Ardor launch will happen in 2017, but the distribution of the main ARDR tokens will be based on the Nxt 1.0 balances. And yes, as far as I know it is the first scalable blockchain platform using 100% proof of stake.
Starting the next 14th of July, the Nxt network will take a snapshot of all the account balances every hour. This will last for three ...
4
Arguments of Nxt creator are written here - https://nxtforum.org/initial-distribution/initial-distribution-of-100-pos-currencies/:
Initial distribution of the coins and the forging schedule are more
serious problems than they appear at first glance. A 100%
proof-of-stake currency needs at least a small part of the coins to be
distributed in the ...
4
From the FAQ:
Early adopters are rewarded for taking the higher risk with their time
and money. In more pragmatic terms, "fairness" is an arbitrary concept
that is improbable to be agreed upon by a large population.
Establishing "fairness" is no goal of Bitcoin, as this would be
impossible.
The vast majority of the 21 million Bitcoins still ...
3
The creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (referred to as a "he" hereafter even though it might be a woman or a group of individuals), seems to have mined many of the early Bitcoin blocks. There have been several analyses identifying blocks mined by a specific single program, based on the nonce and so on, and it is mostly rational to assert that this was Satoshi.
There ...
3
It doesn't matter if a mining pool has 100% of the total mining power so long as that mining pool can't choose which transactions its users work on, prevent them from submitting blocks that they find, or choose which blocks they build from. No change is needed to the Bitcoin protocol as far as I know. Only the protocol used between pools and their clients ...
3
As Bitcoin is a digital-specie currency, if it replaced all fiat currencies it would be the equivalent of reverting to a (digital) gold standard and can be answered in much the same way.
Firstly, a gold standard is deflationary. Explaining this again and again is tedious, so I'll summarise:
People provide goods or services to others and receive IOUs for ...
3
A few projects have done this (although more recently with EOS and Ethereum). The only notable one I can remember off the top of my head is Clamcoin:
Every person who had Bitcoin at block 300,377, Litecoin at block 565,693, or Dogecoin at block 218,556 was given ~4.6 CLAM.
This has spawned a few digging services over the years, where you can upload old ...
2
I agree with you this "early adopter advantage" is not fair per se. But the currency has to start somewhere. And what most people mean when they say BitCoins are fair is there is not a big entity (governments) that are controlling how much money is circulated thereby reducing the value of everyone else's money. Since the amount of Bitcoins in circulation ...
2
No, this is basically impossible. What you're saying is that we would have stable, predictable deflation that could be relied on. This is not possible because it creates a direct contradiction.
Think about it -- which is worth more: One bitcoin today or one bitcoin next year?
Clearly, one bitcoin today must be worth more because one of the things you can ...
2
People who invest now are taking a big risk with their money. They aren't buying now what is guaranteed to be worth $1000 in the future; they are buying now what has a small chance of being worth $1000 in the future and a much larger chance of being worth nothing. If their dreams come true and Bitcoin does take off, that just means they were lucky. Anyone ...
2
All Bitcoin transactions are public, in the sense that everyone can see which addresses sent and received the coins. (However, this includes no information about who owns the addresses.) This is an essential part of the Bitcoin protocol: you can verify the validity of a transaction that sends coins to you, by tracing the "chain of custody" of those coins all ...
2
Try searching BitCoinTalk.org, it has messages from Satoshi going back to late 2009, so I would assume if these messages existed they would be there.
2
The only people that make money directly from the Bitcoin network are miners; as a reward for helping run and secure the network.
There is no connection between the creator and the Bitcoin network. There never have been since the same rules apply to all. Satoshi and other early miners got a lot of bitcoins quite easily early on (similar to investing in a ...
2
If every block subsidizes the forger with extra coins (in addition to the fees) then bigger accounts become even bigger by following the compound interest curve. In a currency with selfish forgers most of the coins would be absorbed by very few accounts that would lead to centralization of the currency.
This was predicted (https://nxtforum.org/alternate-...
2
I remmeber there was BitcoinTalkCoin - the one with BCC ticker, in fact there were few sharing the same idea). They successfully "airdropped" the coins to BTT users, registered before the coin anouncement. I received some myself :) although it was pennies, you can say that the mission was accomplished.
1
"Widely" distributed and "fairly" distributed are two completely different things.
"Fair" means that the mechanism by which the initial distribution was determined is fair, regardless of who ends up with more coins. You could have a fair coin which ends up wholly in the hands of one person, if he earned those coins legitimately and fairly. And you could ...
1
As you noted, a lot of this depends on how you define your terms. In an Objectivist sense, all currencies are equally fair. :)
If we look at fairness in terms of information disparity, we can see some clear winners and losers. Information disparity is important because if insiders know that their coin is technically sound before the general public does, ...
1
Here's a huge infographic concerning distribution. You may also check out the distribution of companies in the globe.
For early posts, only bitcointalk (and, after a while, reddit) can be of help. There was a huge debate during the Occupy movement, as many individuals there thought the distribution wasn't "fair".
1
Proof of work in Bitcoin has two distinct purposes: To issue coins, and to synchronize transactions.
In NXT, PoW for synchronization was eschewed, the stated purpose being reducing long-term energy usage and ecologic harm. They're using PoS instead.
For some reason, probably misunderstanding the roles of PoW, they thought this means they also shouldn't use ...
1
From studying the Whitepaper it appears that there is no technical reason not to have block rewards, rather it appears to be a design decision that the sum of all assets is always zero: When Nxt's Genesis block was created, the Genesis account issued 1,000,000,000 NXT which were distributed to other accounts, hence rendering the account with a negative ...
1
1) Yes, as of now (v9.55.1) it's all at once. BUT, you can increase the issuance by issuing more later unless you "lock" the issuance.
2) So yes, there can be a custom distribution schedule. Example: start with 100, run a "stakeholder" vote via Counterparty broadcast or other method or decide by yourself as the issuer, then increase issuance to say 200. But,...
1
From what I can gather, there were a bunch of people who were able to claim auroracoins through the airdrop using SMS/Facebook based on various forums and social media outlets. In that sense the airdrop was successful. But who knows how many of the airdrops were legitimate. For all we know, most of the airdrop might have gone to the creators of the coins so ...
1
Ok, I'll take a shot at this.
We would need some kind of 'start work message' in the bitcoin system. For instance when miners start working on a block, they would have to broadcast a partial blockheader (minus the nonce) to the bitcoin network. This indicates that they have started to work on that block. Nodes (non-mining nodes) would store that partial ...
1
Mining pools are an important part of the Bitcoin ecosystem and I don't believe they should be disincentivized.
What does need to be done is to eliminate the inherent preference to mine only in the largest pool. This can be done with new mining pool reward frameworks such as Multi-PPS.
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